Page 15 of The Holiday Honeymoon Switch
“Come on, what is going on here? You can’t justknowthat.”
He laughs. “Okay, fine, Gerald called me from the front desk to tell me your situation and make sure I treated you well. Your ex-fiancé is here with another woman when he’s supposed to be here with you? That’s dark, Holly. That’s terrible. It definitely requires the hundred-year-old rum.”
“I actually don’t deserve the expensive rum,” Ivy says, sliding the drink back across the bar. She can’t do this anymore. “It’s my friend who does. I can’t lie to you.”
“What?”
“Since I’m leaving here anyway, you might as well know, I’m not really Holly Beech. She’s my best friend.Shegot left at the altar, then gave me her honeymoon because she is the kindest person in the world and wanted me to spend two weeks here making art. But now her philandering fiancé and his new girlfriend are here. Staying in what was supposed to bemyroom. How could he do something so low?” She flops her head down on the bar top.
The bartender’s dimple has not gone anywhere. If anything, it’s just deeper now. “If it’s not Holly, what is your name?”
“Ivy.”
“Yeah, right. Holly and Ivy.”
She lifts her head from the bar. “That’s really my name, and my best friend is named Holly, andyeah,yeah, we have heardallthe jokes about the stupid Christmas carol. Youknow who loves to make jokes about our names? Matt does. And then he sings the carol, and it gets stuck in my head, and I hate him even more.”
“So you’ve always hated your best friend’s fiancé, even before he turned into the philandering ex?”
“Okay, maybe I didn’t hate him. But I always knew he wasn’t good enough for Holly. She’s the best person. Her one flaw was blindness when it came to Matt’s true character. I kept thinking she knew something about him I didn’t. But now…” She trails off. In the silence, there it is again, almost as if she’s conjured him: Matt’s voice.
“Hey, bartender!”
“Shit.”
Hot Bartender clocks her horrified expression and quickly pushes open the swinging half door leading behind the bar, whispering “Down there” out of the corner of his adorable mouth. Ivy ducks down and clambers behind the bar, pressing herself against a surfboard leaning there. Because ofcourseHot Bartender surfs. She can just picture him hanging ten, his washboard abs encased in a tight wetsuit, nothing about his perfect butt left to the imagination. And then, all at once, the backside she has just been picturing is directly at eye level, and even through slightly baggy khaki shorts, she can tell it’s perfect. She can hear him speaking, above the bar top: “Sorry, man, we’re out of fresh lime juice. Oh, that? No, that’s gone off. Nah, we’re outof white rum, too. Mai tais are off the menu for today. Sorry. Maybe try the pool bar?”
His upper leg brushes against her shoulder, his calf against her arm. She feels her hairs stand on end and moves away a few inches, shifts her focus. Through the small space between the little swinging door she’s crouched behind and the bar, Ivy can see another kiawe tree down by the ocean. It’s not as large and gnarled as the one that shelters the tiki bar, but from this angle she can see the way it’s leaning toward the ocean like it wants to dip its arms in. She would so love to draw that. Suddenly, Ivy feels frustrated tears rising to her eyes.
“Ivy? They’re gone.” She straightens up as he points in the opposite direction of the beautiful tree. “They went that way.” Then his voice grows soft. “Hey—are you okay?”
She blinks her eyes, fast. “I’m totally fine,” she says, even though she isn’t, at all.
“No, you’re not. You have the look on your face people get when it’s their last day here. And you’ve barely been here an hour.” He runs a hand through his hair, messing it up endearingly. “It’s just not fair.”
She manages a wobbly smile. “At least I got to see Hawaii at all, right? And I’ll come back. Someday. Plus, I got to hear you pretend to Matt that you didn’t have any rum or lime juice left. That was pretty good.”
“I’m not serving that jerk again if I can help it. Excuse mea sec.” Another couple has approached the bar, quickly followed by a group of men in golf clothes. Ivy takes her seat and finishes her drink as she searches for flights on her phone. With any luck, there will be one that leaves first thing in the morning; she can sleep in a chair at the airport.
Hot Bartender returns and leans his forearms against the bar.
“I’m just looking for flights,” she murmurs.
“This is not right,” he says. “It’s the holiday season, which to me means nice things are supposed to happen. That the good guys are supposed to win—not the shitty guys like Matt.”
“Yeah, well, it’s nice that there are guys out there like you, but sometimes shitty guys like Mattdowin.”
“No way.” He shakes his head. “Not on my watch, Ivy. I think I have a solution to your problem.”
4
Holly
December 18
Hudson Valley, New York
It’s late afternoon by the time Holly arrives in Krimbo, a tiny town in New York State’s Hudson Valley, after an hour and thirty-nine minutes of listening to Joni Mitchell’s “River” on repeat and somehowstillnot shedding a single tear, even when she switched to “A Long December” by the Counting Crows.
